As eBook sales continue to rise, Lulu wants to be sure you have access to all the latest and greatest tools and resources to help you sell more books in this exciting new market. In order to reach the millions of customers who own e-Reading devices, it is important to stay up to speed on best practices for making an electronic book quickly and easily.

One term you’re likely to come across when publishing your eBook is “metadata.” It also happens to be one of the main causes eBooks get bounced back from distribution. In many cases, a quick revision of your eBook’s metadata is all it takes to push your content out onto digital shelves and increases your work’s marketability.

Simply put, metadata is the who, what, when, and where of your eBook. Items such as your title, author name, volume number, etc. are all types of metadata and are what most retailers use to appropriately list and categorize your content. When your eBook is listed on an online store, customers will see an image of your cover, which they can click on for more information about your work and to access the actual content of your work. Many retailers treat the cover image and the actual eBook’s content as two separate pieces and it is vital that the metadata for both match (including upper and lower case letters) so your customers are linked to the correct book interior.

For example, lets say your book title is The Greatest Book Ever: A Tale of Suspense and Intrigue by Samantha Thomas. If the metadata for your cover is only listed as The Greatest Book Ever, by Sam Thomas, without the subtitle and a different author name, then the retailers can’t be sure if it’s the same work. With the thousands of new eBooks being submitted everyday, it becomes too difficult to try to match the cover to the content.

Luckily, on Lulu it is pretty simple to ensure all your metadata matches. When you start a new project and name it, whatever you enter into the title and author fields will autofill the empty fields in the cover step. Whenever a colon is used in the project title, the system automatically treats any text after it as a subtitle. Once you get to the cover step, you can still edit your title, author name, etc. just be sure if you do make changes, you also go back and change the project information you started with too. For authors uploading a one-piece cover, again, just be sure all the text matches the project information you enter.

Be sure to check out our knowledge base for more eBook metadata tips to help you reach more readers in more markets all over the globe.

Once upon a time, there was a clear distinction between author and publisher. Despite everyone’s knowledge and expertise, not everyone had access to the tools and resources necessary to make content public. Publishing was a closed system. Now, thanks to the Internet and digital text, publishing is open and more and more opportunities are becoming available to creators, businesses, developers and publishers alike – everyday.

Today we live in a world where it’s possible for someone to share their ideas instantaneously across multiple devices and platforms – electronically or in print.

But what comes next?

Lulu Founder and CEO Bob Young shares his thoughts on that question in the The Telepathy Standard below as he highlights why telepathy is the gold standard by which authors transfer content to their readers and how we are getting closer to that standard everyday with advances in technology.

Back in November, I wrote part one in this series. My objective in writing these posts is to help users better understand the Customer Service process, the Community tools available to you, and how to get the most out of both. In part one, I highlighted creating a case with Customer Service. In part two, I would like to cover some of best ways to use our Knowledge Base.

With hundreds of articles on almost every aspect of Lulu from helping new users to after you publish using our Knowledge Base can be daunting to say the least. There are at least two ways to approach it, by searching or browsing. I will discuss both options as well as suggesting a few tips & tricks for using them to find your answers.

Searching

Typically, I recommend searching our database to find the information you’re looking for. It’s probably the quickest way to find what you’re looking for. That said, you want to make sure you are finding the right information.

For example, if I am trying to find out how long I should expect the Mail shipping option to take, what should I enter into the search box? To begin with, I went to the Support home page, and entered “Mail Shipping Option” into the text box. This returned 155 Knowledge Base Articles, 729 Questions, 1029 Discussions, and 59 Ideas. A lot to go through.

Luckily, our search shows the top five results for each category, so all I have to do is look at Articles and try to find the one that matches what I’m looking for. The first option is “Shipping To Prisons” which isn’t exactly what I want. The second option though, “Shipping Times and Options” is exactly what I want.

In short, to get the most out of searching, you want to make sure you choose search terms that most accurately reflect the topic you’re looking for, and focus on the results that are most likely to give you the response you want. It may take a little trial and error, but you should get there.

Browsing

The second method for locating a particular article is browsing. This method is most effective if you know the general stage of publishing you are in, but you aren’t sure exactly what you need to know. Using the same example as above, I will demonstrate how to find the same article by browsing.

To begin, you’ll want to click on the Knowledge Base link from the Support page. From there, you should see a list of categories for articles. By reviewing the descriptions of the categories, I can narrow down what I’m looking for. While none of the categories themselves are titled “Shipping” the category Shopping on Lulu is described as “Learn how to browse, buy, download, or ship on Lulu”. That sounds about right!

Inside this category, I see a new category for “Shipping FAQ“. I’m clearly on the right track. Clicking into that category takes me to a list of articles, and the first one is Shipping Times and Options. Success!

Summary

Get a good idea of what you’re searching or browsing for before you begin looking